How do we discern the will of God?

My first sermon at St. Paul's, delivered on Sunday, July 15, 2012 (the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost).

So what am I supposed to do?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were asking that question? Perhaps you had a difficult decision to make at home. Perhaps the expectations of a supervisor were unclear. Perhaps you struggled with a difficult moral decision and you didn’t know how to decide what was the “right” thing to do. You may have found yourself asking yourself or God, “So what am I supposed to do – in this situation, with this information, with this person or group of people?”

Perhaps at times like those, our opening collect this morning might be helpful. It asks God that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.” The first thing we can do when we are unsure of what we are supposed to do is to pray, to ask for God’s guidance on the matter.

Now, that sounds nice, but if you’re like me, perhaps you’re wondering how exactly we will know for sure what God’s answers to our prayers for guidance are. Should we expect a bolt of lighting? A voice from the sky? A sign or uncanny coincidence that tells us that something is “meant to be”?

Or might it perhaps be more subtle: a certain inner tug on the heart, an intuition, a “gut feeling” that tells us we should do a certain thing?

The biblical figures we encounter in the scripture today all struggled in some way with what they “ought” to do:

- David set out to bring the ark of the Lord to Jerusalem because he believed it was God’s will for him to do so, but what our lectionary leaves out from the reading is that along the way, one of the men who was driving the cart with the ark on it was struck dead after touching the ark. After that, David was afraid to bring the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at the house of Obed-edom. Our reading picks up again after David has decided it is safe to continue bringing the ark to Jerusalem because things have gone well for the house of Obed-edom while the ark was there. But in that in between time, there was a struggle for him about what he “ought” to do – should he bring this sacred object that apparently had the power to destroy people at whim into the midst of the city he was building to be the center of power of his empire? Ultimately, he is convinced that God indeed does want the ark in Jerusalem and so he takes it there.

- The author of Ephesians boldly asserts that he knows God’s will for all creation: “with wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will… a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him.” He says all these things quite confidently, but in fact they represent his perspective on a struggle in the early church about what they “ought” to do in spreading the message about Jesus – was the message only for other Jews, or could non-Jews be brought in to the community as well? The author of Ephesians, writing in the tradition of the Apostle Paul, believes it is God’s will for the message to spread to all people – both Jews and Gentiles.

- King Herod’s struggle with what he “ought” to do is perhaps the most obvious one: when Herodias’s daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herod was “deeply grieved” because he believed John to be a “righteous and holy man” and did not want to kill him, but he gave in to the girl’s request out of a sense of duty – he felt he “ought” to keep his word to her. In doing so, he allowed a sense of duty and pride to override his deeper sense of what was right.

Herod’s story is a good example of the fact that not everything we feel we “ought” to do is of God or in accordance with God’s will. Sometimes, like Herod, we feel we “ought” to do things out of a sense of duty, even if we think the action is wrong. Or we might feel we “ought” to do things because other people expect or want us to do them, even if we don’t want to do them ourselves. So how can we tell whether a sense that we “ought” to do something is motivated by the proddings of the Spirit or a guilt trip from the demands of the world?

These are not new questions. The church has struggled since its earliest days to discern the will of God for the community and to live it out, and we still struggle to know what we “ought” to do as a church today. These questions are at the heart of what we ask ourselves whenever we gather as a church – whether in the local parish, at the diocesan level, or as a whole body at the General Convention.

Through the centuries, Christians have come up with different ways to answer these questions, with criteria or guidelines for discerning God’s will and for determining whether a desire to do something is of God or not.

One of the most common answers is that the will of God must be discerned in community. Any individual who believes God is calling him or her to do something should take it to the community to benefit from their collective wisdom, or at least to a spiritual director or confidant who can help the person discern whether the direction they are feeling pulled in is of God or not.

In doing so, the community or spiritual director may ask the individual to look at the potential fruits of that decision. Will it bring greater peace to that person’s life? Will it bring him or her closer to God? Jesus pointed out to his disciples that healthy trees bear good fruit, while unhealthy ones do not, using this metaphor to apply to people: “by their fruits you will know them.” The same can be applied to any of our individual or communal decisions. How will this decision potentially affect us and those in our community? Do those potential results seem in line with what we think God would want for us?

And, of course, as a community rooted in the Scriptures, we also will ask what guidance we can find in the Bible on the matter, although this can be a tricky one, since we have to wade through centuries of layered meanings, cultural and historical contexts, and translations to truly understand what the biblical text is saying about any given matter. And the biblical texts do not always speak with one voice on an issue. There are many tensions between seemingly different perspective and theological approaches represented in the Bible, since they were written by different authors and over a long period of time. Still, as a church we affirm that the Scriptures were inspired by God and that God continues to speak to us through them, and so we seek to root our decision-making in the witness of the Bible.

Ultimately, though, I think it is important to remind ourselves that however many “tests” we may apply to our feelings about any given decision, we cannot ever fully know the will of God in this life. The Apostle Paul says that “now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face.” The questions and uncertainties that we have in this life about the ways of a God much bigger than we are will have to wait for the next life to be completely resolved.

And this need not lead us to despair, for although part of the work of the church is to discern and do the work of God in the world, the other part of our work – and really the first and most important part of our work – is simply to praise and worship the Almighty God whose mysteries are beyond human understanding. In the Jewish tradition, each copy of the Talmud, the collection of writings and commentary on the scriptures, begins on page 2, leaving the first page blank to remind the reader of all that we do not know or understand about God.

Christians have at times been rather smug about thinking we have God all figured out because we believe God was incarnate in Jesus – so we have an actual human being we can read about and learn from and after we’ve done all that, we’ve pretty much got God all figured out. But how much do we really even understand Jesus? The early church ran itself in circles and shed all kinds of blood arguing over exactly how they should make sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and what it meant for the world. And surely the mystery of Christ’s indwelling in us by the Holy Spirit through our baptism is beyond our human understanding! Perhaps we could take a lesson from our Jewish brothers and sisters and leave a little blank space at the beginning of our volumes of theology, our attempts to speak in words what is ultimately unspeakable.

So how do we know what we ought to do? How do we, as a community, discern the will of God for us? Well, we pray – turning the matter over to God and waiting for a revelation or some sense of inner clarity – but we also engage our reason, turning to the scriptures and the community of the church. We “test the spirits” of revelation based on this tradition that has been both received and reshaped by the body of faithful Christians throughout the history of the church. We look at the potential fruits of our decisions. And we do the best we can with the knowledge and insights we have – all the while remaining open to the possibility that we might make the wrong decision, but trusting that God’s grace and mercy will catch and redirect us if we do.

I hope it is in this spirit that we can view the decisions of the church, both those decisions that we make for our life together here at St. Paul’s and the decisions that were made over the past two weeks by the General Convention. Whether we feel that St. Paul’s or the Episcopal Church is doing what it “ought” to do or not, we might remind ourselves that our own sense of what we “ought” to do might not be God’s sense of what we “ought” to do, and that even if we are certain we are doing God’s will, we have no guarantees that that is actually the case! By their fruits we will know them, perhaps, but even in our judgment of the fruits of our decisions, we are seeing through a glass darkly.

But no matter whether we have discerned God’s will for us correctly or not, we can trust that, as Thomas Merton famously wrote, God will “lead us by the right path though we may know nothing about it.” In other words, God’s the one really in control here, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes the best thing for us to do when we feel confused about what we “ought” to do is to return to that blank first page and rest in that.